Giorgio Cavazzano

Unquestionably the most innovative and dynamic of all the Italian Disney
artists, Giorgio Cavazzano started his precocious Disney career at the
age of 14 as the third inker of Romano Scarpa,
then 34.

Although he has written a few scripts himself, he is above all an
outstanding graphical artist. Born in Venice in 1947, Cavazzano, a
true natural talent, was already inking the pencils of his cousin
Luciano Capitanio at a mere 12. After a few years of inking practice
as Scarpa's apprentice he asked his master to let him have a go at the
pencils: his first story as a complete artist, written by Abramo
Barosso and scripted by his brother Gian Paolo
(a detailed study [in
Italian] backs this attribution), appeared in 1967 as
"Paperino e il singhiozzo a
martello" (TL 611), recently reprinted in CWDNS 211. His
creative curiosity got him interested early on in many great
non-Disney artists such
as Uderzo, Franquin,
Jacovitti — then virtually unknown
to most of his narrow-minded colleagues at Mondadori. Guided by a powerful
urge to innovate he boldly experimented, during the early and mid '70s,
with a new, vibrant graphic style in which the rubber-like qualities of
the traditional Disney characters merged with adventurous and realistic
rendering of machinery and techno-gadgets. His best stories from this "techno"
phase, mostly scripted by the gifted Giorgio Pezzin, stood out so obviously
from the rest that even very occasional readers would recognise and appreciate
him at once — anyone who was a Topolino-reading kid at the time will remember
the submarine of "Paperoga e il peso
della gloria" (TL 1007, 1975) and the kamikaze bomber of "Paperino
e l'eroico smemorato" (TL 1059, 1976). He was obviously venturing
very far from the Disney canons, and anyone of lesser talent doing the
same would have simply strayed off course; but, to bring back an often-quoted
remark by comic writer Tiziano Sclavi, "Over the years, Giorgio
managed to be Cavazzano and Disney at once. Before him, this had only been
achieved by people like Carl Barks.".

Giorgio did this wonderful little sketch for me in just a couple
of minutes (!!!) while we were at lunch in Lucca in November 1997. It's on
the first page of the book, edited by Luca Boschi, that reprints this very
same essay (see the bibliography below for details).

Cavazzano's influence on other Disney artists has been enormous. Taken
as an ideal of perfection by many if not most of the Italian Disney artists
of the new generation (some of whom sadly fail to see the importance of
expanding their comics culture beyond their very narrow horizons before
settling on slavish imitation of a model, however good), he was also inspirational
to the evolution of his great contemporary Massimo De Vita.

Besides ducks and mice the eclectic venetian artist has also been focusing
his skills on many other fields. Over the course of his career he created
an amazing array of comics characters outside the Disney universe, among
which are Walkie & Talkie (1974), Oscar e Tango (1974), Altai
& Jonson (1975), Smalto & Jonny
(1976), Slim Norton (1977), Silas Finn (1979),
I due colonnelli (1977), Big Bazoom
(1983), Capitan Rogers (1981), Timothée Titan (1987), Jungle
Bungle (1991), not to mention his work in advertising. He is the recipient
of many comics awards.

Bibliography

The Cavazzano fan can rejoice: our author is now rather popular. I still
feel that there is a gap to be filled, in that there is no true ultimate
book on Cavazzano yet, but the union of the sources below is pretty good
reading anyway. Sorry, but they're all in Italian.

If you're interested in Cavazzano you can't miss this one. The lavishly
illustrated booklet (mostly black and white but with some colour pictures)
opens with a long interview, goes on with 10 pages of photographs and then
offers a dozen contributions by well-known comic authors and critics, each
writing three or four pages and presenting Cavazzano from a different angle.
After this, an extensive index of all his stories, both Disney and not.

Thin, cheap, good value. Its story index isn't too accurate, but buy
the booklet for the excellent card file on all of Cavazzano's non-Disney
characters. Worthy of note also for its 10-page interview and for some
interesting commentaries.

A large-format (24x34cm), low-circulation fanzine which is probably
going to be hard to track down. It contains the most complete, accurate
and up-to-date Cavazzano index of those I've seen, a long interview and
two non-Disney science fiction Cavazzano stories scripted by Rudy Salvagnini.
But best of all is the optional portfolio
with12 outstanding large-format reproductions of illustrations (tempera
and pencils) that the master did especially for this publication.

At last a full length book! This one came out after this web page was
written and in fact it includes this essay as one of its chapters
(if we except a certain entry in the bibliography...). It is by far the
most comprehensive resource of all the ones mentioned above and it features
a wonderful collection of previously unpublished illustrations. You really
can't miss it. Despite the title, it is all in Italian, except for my
chapter (the one you're reading here) which was left in English.

Cavazzano's art periods

As I did with Scarpa some time ago, I'll go through Cavazzano's Disney
stories highlighting the different phases in his graphical evolution. Cavazzano
is a peculiar artist in that at various stages he changed his style so
much that it might be more appropriate to speak of "revolution",
or even "metamorphosis", instead of "evolution". During
my first ventures as a Disney philologist many years ago, without the help
of a chronological framework, I even thought that "Bel Tratto Sottile"
and "Techno" were two completely different people! Thus a chronological
analysis of Cavazzano's work is particularly interesting and revealing,
as it pinpoints those narrow transitions between periods that highlight
the continuity within the metamorphosis.

Once again let me warn you that the names of these phases are of my
own invention and that, as with anything related to aesthetic judgement,
you might have wildly different opinions on the subject. I based my study
on the chronological index by Luigi Marcianò contained in the Gulliver
fanzine referred to above, which I consider to be the most accurate so
far.

The name after the story title is that of the author
of the script. If you know of any non-Italian versions of any of the stories
mentioned, let me know the exact title and I'll add it next to the original
to help those who speak your language recognize the story too.
I am also noting other Italian reprints of the story where I am
aware of them, although information on reprints is not intended to be complete.

1967 - 1969: Scarpa's apprentice

Scarpa's influence is very heavy on these first stories. And, although
sometimes the proportions of the main characters may look slightly odd
and give the game away, in many cases even an expert eye could be forgiven
for mistaking a Cavazzano page for a Scarpa one (see in particular the
"golf redditizio" and
"casa gonfiabile" stories below).
The similarity is of course accentuated by the fact that in this period
Cavazzano was inking both Scarpa's stories and his own, so the finishing
stroke was the same.

As a curiosity we may note that the presence of a "golf club"
in Zio Paperone e il golf redditizio,
Cavazzano's second story, gave our artist the opportunity to embed his
monogram (the interwoven G and C letters) in
some panels without asserting straight out that it was his signature. He
will play this trick again over
the years, peppering many of his stories either with this monogram (for
which the golf redditizio story is the first appearance), or with
a cursive signature or even
something else. The classic fan game is to re-read a well known story trying
to spot some hidden Cavazzano trademark.

1969 - 1973: Bel Tratto Sottile

In just a couple of years after drawing his first stories Cavazzano
graduates from apprentice to master, reaching maturity (or rather his first
maturity, I should perhaps say) and his own personal style. There
is still a noticeable Scarpa influence, but the work is easily recognisable
as original. Compared to Scarpa, he shows a tendency to draw very thin
or very fat characters, something he'll do even more in later years. His
stroke is beautiful — thin and very elegant; in fact this is what Bel
Tratto Sottile means. I've called him that for so long, before realising
he was the same as "the well-known Cavazzano" (i.e. the Techno
one) that I couldn't persuade myself to change this name
even for this English-language description. During this phase his most
fruitful collaborations are those with the great Rodolfo Cimino, who writes
for him many fascinating plots of Duck adventures in faraway locales with
elements of wisdom from ancient people.

Paperino e l'avventura sottomarina,
Cimino, TL 873 (1972), CWDNS 2
A wonderful romantic story in which Donald falls in love with Reginella,
a beautiful underwater queen coming from another world. This story left
a deep mark in many readers as Donald had at last found a true love, unlike
the superficial and ever-incomplete relationship with the voluble Daisy
Duck. Cimino and Cavazzano came back to it several times, probably encouraged
by fans, adding an episode every few years, always making it look like
it would really be the last possible meeting, well aware of course that
this love story could not have a happy end within the Disney continuity.

I said that Bel Tratto Sottile was Cavazzano's first maturity.
In fact, for anyone else, it might very well have been the apogee of an
excellent career: splendid art and good teamwork with imaginative
script writers. But our author went on. 1973 was the transition period
of this dramatic change of style, from a thin and elegant stroke to a nervous
and powerfully dynamic one which mixed thin pen lines with heavy brush
strokes and breathed fresh new life into the Disney cast.

Zio Paperone e l'operazione galeone,
Pavese, TL 937-938 (1973)
In an interview appearing in the Yellow book (p. 147), Cavazzano
himself mentions this story as a turning point. "...One morning I noticed
a change in my style: I was drawing a page with the ducks swimming
towards the bottom of the sea, wearing black wet suits, and I suddenly
felt I discovered something very important, seeing that I could
move them in a way that was different from the usual one. Even now I experience
some emotion when talking about it, because everything started from there.
It's from that moment on that I started to modify the characters and
study them in a personal way."

1973 - 1977: Techno

This is where Cavazzano takes the Disney comic world by storm, electrifying
the characters and breaking the canons of conventional Disney-style art.
This is when people start to recognise that there are Cavazzano stories
in Topolino, even at a time when the publisher didn't print any credits,
because most readers can recognise this very personal and dynamic style
and relate it to other non-Disney comics by Cavazzano.
While his characters tend more and more towards caricatures, either
slim and tall or round and fat, the machinery is rendered with accurate
and realistic detail. Page layout and viewing angles are also new fields
for bold experimentation. During this nervous, dynamic and exciting graphical
phase his best works are based on frantic plots by Giorgio Pezzin, who
has an excellent sense of rythm and punctuates the stories with frequent
hilarious gags. Their Fethry Duck / Donald Duck stories are absolute masterpieces.
Note that, at the same time, the Pezzin / Cavazzano duo was also working
on other similar comic character pairs: Walkie e Talkie, Oscar e Tango
and most notably Smalto e Jonny.

Paperino e il croccante al diamante,
Pezzin, TL 1108 (1977)
As Ole R. Nielsen reported to the disney-comics list on 1996 03
21, this story has recently been published by Gladstone in Walt Disney
Giant #5 as "Snacking Sleuths", though sadly in heavily butchered
form, so you're strongly advised to get a reprint from a better source.
I can't understand how an otherwise serious and respectable publisher
like Gladstone could afford to censor out 11 pages from a story! Sigh...

1977 - 1990: The Model

We could have called Techno a second maturity, again in the sense
that Cavazzano was then a complete and accomplished author and would have
got his place in the history books even if he had done nothing different
after that.
Instead, when viewed in the wider context of his actual evolution,
Techno itself appears to be a transition phase, an extended experiment
that allows Cavazzano to sharpen new tools for what becomes his later,
true maturity. He tones down the wildest graphical extremes and lets his
previously restless characters cool down a bit. He is still definitely
master of his art, only no longer an unrestrained crazy genius.
I called this phase The Model because most of the new artists
joining the ranks of the Italian Disney publisher look at him, at this
Cavazzano, for inspiration. Up to a point, this is very flattering;
but after that it becomes slightly annoying. Cavazzano gets back to this
very modern (but now within the canons) style after a long personal journey
through the other phases we've seen, so he "earns" this modernity
through his distilled experience. But many of the new authors pick up this
style not as the result of a personal growth but simply because Cavazzano
is the most popular and modern artist, thus achieving only superficial
results.
Among the best things of this long period are the stories with the
alien duck OK Quack and the private detective Umperio Bogarto, two new
characters created by Carlo Chendi.

Topolino e Minni in "Casablanca",
Cavazzano, TL 1657 (1987)
One of the very few stories scripted by Cavazzano himself, this
parody of the Humphrey Bogart film is uniquely rendered in painted black
and white.

1989 - now: Essential

This is not really a separate phase from The Model; we're still
in the same basic period, with the same distinguishing features. But I
opened a new section (the boundaries of which are actually rather fuzzy) to
remark that lately Cavazzano has evolved towards a more essential style,
almost spartan. Elegant as always, but with fewer, heavier strokes. Even
if the inflation of would-be Cavazzanos has almost stolen his own style
from him, he still is the only one who really owns it because it
comes out of his personal journey. Proof of it is, he is the only
one who can render the Cavazzano style with just hints, instead of all
the intricate detail that used to characterise it.
Absolute masterpieces from this phase are the sword stories by Marconi
(especially the first one, "Topolino
e la spada invincibile") and the new romantic series by the
poet Cimino, "Nonna Papera e i racconti intorno al fuoco", where
Grandma Duck becomes the storyteller of stories that don't involve Donald
or Mickey.

Buon compleanno, Paperino!, Gilbert,
TL 2011 (1994)
This story is unusual from several points of view: it was done
originally for Egmont instead of Disney Italia and it features electronic
colours (by Leopoldo Barbarini), still not too common on Italian stories.
The letterer, too (Diego Ceresa of Zio Paperone fame), is not
the usual one for Topolino.
TL 2011 credits the script to Bob Foster, but Harry Fluks tells us
on disney-comics (1996 05 20) that the true author is Janet Gilbert,
Foster being only the editor. Gilbert's original title is "No Fool
Like an Old Fool " and the Egmont story code is D93135. Reprints
exist in at least Danish (Jumbobog Ekstra "Hurra for Anders And "),
French, German (L. Taschenbuch 196).

Frank (Filologo Disneyano)
All the Disney comic images available from this
page are (c) The Walt Disney Company Italia. They are provided for purposes
of study and reference, to allow the reader to personally compare the periods
being talked about and/or identify a foreign translation of a story. Disney's
copyright is acknowledged and respected.